Pitt employee makes faces

By day, he lives in a world of petri dishes and microscopes. But off the clock, Greg Lightner… By day, he lives in a world of petri dishes and microscopes. But off the clock, Greg Lightner creates monsters and zombies, severed limbs and bloodied faces.

On a normal day, Lightner, 35, works as a lab prep director in the biological sciences department at the University of Pittsburgh. He helps students and instructors with labs, assists with technical support and prepares cultures for labs. But in his spare time, Lightner works as a professional makeup artist, working on horror productions and doing makeup for actors and brides.

What started out as a childhood love for creating gashes and scars with makeup exploded into a potential career in 2008 when Lightner participated in the Zombie Walk at the Monroeville Mall, and people started noticing his work.

“I had done myself and my [then-]boyfriend’s makeup for the event,” Lightner said in an email. “I thought it was OK but nothing spectacular. When we got there, people started taking pictures left and right and stopped us to ask questions.”

At the event, WQED’s television show “OnQ” and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interviewed Lightner.

“From that point forward I started thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I have a talent I should pursue,’” Lightner said. “And so I started learning everything I could about effects and really pushing the boundaries of what I knew how to do and what could be done.”

Before the Zombie Walk, Lightner worked as an actor and makeup artist at the annual Fright Night at Kennywood Park. There he met Heather Seigh, a fellow actor who played a hand in helping Lightner get a job at Pitt.

Seigh, 29, is also a lab prep director and met Lightner in 2004. She said Lightner created the best effects and would always show up to Fright Night with his makeup done. When Lightner became the official makeup artist for Fright Night, she always made sure he did her makeup.

“I always went to him to get my makeup done because he was the best one,” Seigh said. “I’ve known him for eight years, and he’s been doing my makeup since for any special event.”

Lightner started off by just painting effects on himself, but soon he learned to create 3-D effects on his skin with cotton and latex. Then he learned how to make prosthetics for his face.

After the publicity at the Monroeville Mall, The Rage of the Stage Players, a local theater company that focuses on alternative themes like horror, hired Lightner to do the makeup for its play “Twisted Monologues” in 2010. Lightner has been working with the company ever since.

James Shoberg, co-executive producer of the company, commended Lightner’s dedication to the craft. Even at his busiest, Lightner managed to design special effects for Shoberg’s plays.

Shoberg said he has seen the work of many trained makeup artists but that none of them compare to Lightner, who taught himself everything he knows.

“It boggles the mind,” Shoberg, 35, said. “He’s the best we’ve ever had, and I’ve had the easiest time collaborating with him.”

Lightner’s growing portfolio caught the attention of a casting editor from the Syfy channel “Face Off,” a reality competition show for makeup artists. Lightner went through a challenging six-month audition process in 2011 and was one of fourteen contestants chosen for the show.

Lightner said the final round of the audition process involved putting makeup on himself in front of the judges. He decided to portray himself as an infected scientist, but his nerves got the better of him, and he put too much blue color in the makeup while mixing the ingredients.

“It was such a fail,” Lightner said. “I told the judges I that I did the blue face so that they would notice the red coming from my mouth.”

Despite the blue face, Lightner was cast on “Face Off,” a show that would give him a large amount of exposure to a world he had not known much about before.

“One of my goals if I got on the show was to meet others in the industry who have the same interests as I do,” Lightner said in an email.

Prior to “Face Off,” Lightner had not made many friends in the makeup industry, but his experience on the show led to a much larger network.

“Almost the entire cast has bonded from this experience, and we are all very close now,” Lightner said. “We affectionately call ourselves a family now. Needless to say, I met my goal.”

Lightner was eliminated from the show on the first episode. He said it was brutal.

“Nobody wants to be the first one off,” Lightner said. “But I can’t believe I beat out thousands of people just to make it on the show.”

For the first episode of “Face Off,” Lightner and his team of seven men had to reimagine “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the children’s book by L. Frank Baum. Lightner worked on recreating the Tin Man on a mannequin.

“The Tin Man actually cuts off his own limbs in the book,” Lightner said. “Our theme was horror so we created a half-tin, half-man.”

Lightner’s appearance on “Face Off” has helped him out professionally by making him well-known in the makeup world.

In July 2011, he did the makeup for the film “Corpsing,” a horror-love story made by 72nd St. Films. In December 2011, he was also hired to do the makeup for a music video for a local singer, Antoniette Costa.

Lightner has since received many job offers but does not want to leave Pitt’s prep lab in the middle of the semester. He has two gigs lined up for the immediate future: making a custom prosthetic body part for a customer and making a mock of the different stages of bed sores for a medical company.

Lightner said many makeup and special effects artists work with medical companies to make actual prosthetics such as dentures.

“A lot of science is involved in this,” Lightner said. “A lot of chemistry. You have to know what chemicals react together.”

Lightner has been invited to Transworld, a haunters convention in St. Louis, Mo., this summer, where people who work on haunted houses get together to buy props and mingle.

Lightner still has not come to total terms with his success in the business. He is supposed to take something to Transworld to sell to customers but has no idea how to make his work tangible so that people can buy it.

“It’s going to be weird going to conventions and being on the other side [of the tables],” he said. “I’m not going to be an attendee. I can’t even wrap my head around that yet.”

For Lightner, the thrill of being a makeup artist comes from the reactions of onlookers to how realistic he makes his work.

“I like that what I make actually looks real,” he said. “Even though it washes off in the end, and all I have is a photo, I still get that creative joy.”